In the field of computer storage, thin provisioning refers to the practice of using virtualization technology to give the appearance of having more physical resources than are actually available. Thin provisioning operates by allocating disk storage space in a flexible manner among multiple users, based on the minimum space required by each user at any given time. Each of the application tasks associated with the multiple users operates under the assumption that it has physical memory allocated. The sum of the allocated virtual memory assigned to tasks is typically greater than the total of physical memory. Thin Provisioning, in a shared storage environment, is a method for optimizing utilization of available storage. The concept of thin provisioning is to allocate storage (blocks or other measures of storage capacity) when application data is effectively written to a host attached storage device or volume. This is the fundamental difference between the traditional, fully provisioned volume, where the volume capacity is entirely allocated at the time the volume is created, and thin provisioning, which relies on on-demand allocation of blocks of data versus the traditional method of up-front allocation of all the storage blocks to an application.